Religion in Thirteen Parts
by 4pollos
Summary: This is the story of the lover gods they tell children. Skwisgaar/Toki.


This is one of the most draining things (and definitely the most draining fic) I have ever written. I took canon and I fucking _ran_ with it. This is my obligatory "what happens to Toki?" fic except it's also not, in a way. This is also a compilation (not literally, but with similar ideas) of all the fics I started and never finished for whatever reason relating back to the subject of post-season 4 finale Toki and Skwisgaar. I apologize henceforth for, like, the entire thing, I guess.

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I. HELL

He leaves and nothing takes his place.

The initial frenzy following his abduction lasts five hours. It begins with the opening in the ground and the Revengencers crawling out. They're separated from him, held in the clutches of a madman, and his voice fails him when he opens his mouth to scream. It doesn't matter-the others can speak for him, and they do, calling out to their fallen brother. He reaches out and gropes in the air, fingers wrapping around the slumped figure in the distance like he'll actually get ahold of him. He and the madman disappear into the mist and he can't see anything. The blindness lasts beyond the fog as he enters the second hour, shuffled into the submarine, he's sitting at a long wooden table with his head down and the heels of his hand pressing so hard into his eyes it's going to leave bruises and possibly kill him. Somebody knocks against his shoulders and without meaning to and he emits a long, deep whining noise. It sounds like the sour guitar notes _he _used to play, the amp tuned wrong and fat fingers awkward on the neck of an expensive instrument. This realization hits him in the chest and then he can't breathe, his lungs constricted. His senses and functions disappear into the hour one by one until he is the epitome of lethargy.

In the third hour somebody pulls him from his chair and drags him into the submarine's meeting room. They speak a prophecy in a language that he knows but can't comprehend at the moment, something-a guitar, he thinks-is pressed into his hands, and then he's falling to the ground as their submarine hits an obstacle in the water. The wall bursts, water rushes in and oh, he's going to die, and he's not going to mind, not at all. Pressure and liquid fill the submarine but then he's in another room, he doesn't remember moving, he's in a small pod with his body pressed against the others, they're floating away from the submarine in what feels like the slowest motion he's ever experienced. An enormous tentacled beast has its spindly, fleshy limbs wrapped around the submarine, crushing it into bits. They drift through the water for a long time and it sucks, or it would suck if he was thinking about it, but he's not. He's not thinking about anyting. Eventually they dock on an identical submarine, well into hour four.

The frenzy dies, but only a little. He's in a room that resembles his old bedroom, on the bed, on his back, and somebody is sitting beside him, explaining something. He still can't understand it; blood is running from his ears and nose, a nurse at his side attending him. His blindness has returned. He finds it impossible to move and wonders if he'll suffocate on his own blood as it flows into his mouth. The explainer eats the rest of the hour up, places a guitar beside the bed (he can't remember what happened to the one that had been in his arms in the explosion) then leaves. He looks at the guitar and cannot fathom even touchign it, much less picking it up into his arms and playing it. The nurse stays, their face obscured by a black hood, shoves medicine down his throat, and then they are gone, too, and he thinks that he's fallen asleep.

Upon waking he goes to a bathroom that doesn't belong to him and takes three quarters of an hour to find. There is emptiness running through his veins; he ties a band around his arm, finds a fat vein and shoves a needle through his skin for the first time in a long time. The heroin filters into his bloodstream but his hand slips, the needle comes out and takes with it any sanity he had left. His eyes roll back as the drugged haze descends upon him, blankets his shoulders and wraps its undefined arms around his waist. His veins run emptier than before. He falls to the floor on the spot, twitches until he stops, and doesn't move for a day. The best part, his favorite part, is that he doesn't _think_, just lays on this abandoned bathroom floor as the high ebbs away. He tries to get it back, to wrap it around him again, but he can't without another needle and he doesn't have the strength to move. The rest don't notice; he picks himself up when he realizes that despair isn't going to get anything done. He returns to despair when he realizes that nothing is going to get done anyway.

The pressure underwater is great and he bleeds from every scrape and sore he has ever received. They reappear on his skin in an explosion that drops him to his knees in the middle of walking from his bathroom to his bedroom. The nurse is by his side at every minute, but they can't help him. He fucks them and discovers that they are a female, an older but not old woman with a comfortable breast that he lays his head upon and cries into after he finishes fucking her, fast, angry and with no regard for her own pleasure. She pets his hair and says soothing things in that language that he hasn't yet found the ability to understand. She can't help him.

He feels like he is being exsanguinated and he is almost positive that he _is_. He tries to express his feelings to somebody else but they give him a blank stare, shake their head and blink. They tell him they miss him, too. He balks; no, that is not possible, nobody misses him as much as he does. His other half is gone. He uses the term _soul mate_, but it is futile, for they don't understand and it's not quite right, but it's the best he can do. The words are clunky on his tongue. The understanding of the language is coming back only slowly. He is mournful.

II. BLOOD

He doesn't know where he is. They took his clothes from him and gave him baggy (but soft) sweatpants and an oversized white shirt with a rubber band to either it or his hair. He chose the shirt, bunching it to the side and exposing a strip of his hip. They threw him into a room without a doorknob on his side of the door. The sole window, a rectangular slit that light barely slithers through, sits high and is barred. There is an adjoined bathroom without a door and the bones of proper plumbing. He spends a lot of time in the shower, grooming himself, for lack of better things to do. He teaches himself how to braid his hair and he braids it frequently: first to the side, training his fingers, then strong down his back, then on both sides, and finally in the smallest, finest braids he can manage, sprouting from his head in every direction. He undoes them seconds after he does them without seeing what they look like for there is no mirror and then showers the waves in his hair away. He remains near the shower head after he showers since there is a drain on the floor that the water dripping off his body can disappear into. The drain has only the tiniest holes in it and when he gets on his hands and knees, naked after a shower and with his clothes laying in wait for him on the bed, he can see nothing if he peers through the grate. He stands, not sure what he expected, and now dry, walks to the bed to dress himself. There are no blankets on the bed and a thin mattress that is uncomfortable to lay upon. He lays down anyway, his hair damp from the shower and spreading a stain across the mattress, and curls his limbs into his body. It is not cold in the room but he is cold.

Every day at noon he is given a piece of tasteless bread and glass of lukewarm water through a part of the wall that opens up beside his bed but is far too small for humans to pass through. They allocate him five minutes-he counts the seconds one day to see-to drink his water and take his bread before the tray comes sliding back into the wall automatically. The tray seems to be part of the chute that he peers down as he eats his bread and drinks his water cross-legged in front of the attached tray, unable to see the end of it. Neat metal walls, unlike the smooth blocks of concrete that make up the walls in his room, disappear into nothingness. He tilts his head to the side, once more unsure of what he expected to see.

When he discovers all he can about his new room and his curiosity dies a dull death, he cries plentiful and wonders where his rescue is. The days are impossibly long. He doesn't know where they start and night begins, or where night ends and day begins. He has gathered that the window filters light from a room where light is always on, that it is not natural light. He figures that he is trapped underground somewhere. He is in a cellar or a prison or something similar. There is a possibility that he will die here. He rocks against every corner, knees to his chest and arms around them, and feels like he is aging backwards. He is reminded of his childhood in every nook and cranny of his room, of his new Punishment Hole. Like when he was little, he cannot figure out what he did wrong. He tried so hard to live a good life, to make people happy, to not fuck up. But he has fucked up. He drags his nails, growing long with no guitar to cradle in his arms, along his skin. Blood bubbles out of the cuts and slides down his arms, his legs, the top of his feet and along his chest. He washes it off in the shower and turns the temperature the hottest it will go, scalding the open wounds and his skin. He grits his teeth and bears it. He's such a fucking horrible human being that he has to suffer this brand of punishment _twice _in his lifetime. Once again he's shoved underground, _contained_. In his youth it was shackles, in his adulthood it is being without an escape. This time he doesn't even have a clown to comfort him. He has nothing but his own mind, and his own mind fucking hates itself, and if it could it would direct its' body to scrape the scalp away so it could burn itself to ash in the shower. He growls at himself every time a part of his body comes into his vision.

It starts to feel like bookends, like he's reaching the end, it's inevitable. He bites his tongue, his lips, the inside of his mouth, his wrist, anywhere he can place his mouth. He howls in pain when he bites the inside of his ankle and lets his mouth fill with blood, getting all over his face when he parts his lip to let loose the involuntary noise. Afterwards his ankle drops and he covers his mouth, afraid of being heard and killed for his disobedience. When a long amount of time passes with no discernable change in his situation, he screams to test it out. Nobody responds; he screams and screams until his voice is hollow and his throat aches and the blood has dried on his hands and his face. Nothing happens. He turns the water on the shower all the way to the hot end and burns his skin, letting himself yowl in protest this time. Nothing happens. He turns the water all the way to the cold end and freezes himself until his edges are turning blue and his vision is blurring, letting himself whine as his body fights his brain. Nothing happens. He punches the wall, he kicks the sink, he slams his body against the door, nothing happens. Nothing happens.

III. POSSESSION

He locks himself into his room, locks it from the outside. It is himself, his memories, and nothing else. He doesn't know his motive. To purge? To meditate? To discover? He is not sure. It is not even that hard to say goodbye to the nurse, of whom he has grown fond of, or at least fond of fucking. All he does all day is sit on his bed-a bed they (and he does not mean the nurse) did not get the opportunity to share-and stare out a small, circular window. He watches water, and sometimes fish, pass by, the water blue in the morning and black at night, the fish sometimes alone and sometimes in thick groups. He does not know how deep beneath the surface they are, or even their general location in relation to countries or continents or bodies of water. He knows how deep he is, personally. His blood is almost gone; his skin sticks to his bones, his flesh withering, and he is so empty, so cold. He does not allow himself the pleasure of blankets. He locked them outside, along with the rest of his luxuries and the world. He lays on the bed and curls his limbs into his body.

He is consumed by memories and sometimes, he is able to trick himself into reliving them. He has discovered the true trick to time travelling: denial and repression. He repeats words he had said before everything happened on his tongue. He plays the role of his partner, his words dancing a burning little dance on his tongue. With no outsiders to judge him, he does not feel crazy. He feels the most sane he has during this whole excursion, locked in his room with no company but the ghost of his partner and his own thoughts. He takes to inventing things that never happened, writing plays and performing them with the associated movements and all. In his version of the world they were never separated and he saved him from the madman. They-he isn't sure who _they _are, but somebody else, somewhere else-claimed him as a hero. The world never ended. They lived a long life and died together. It was all very romantic, all very unlike him, and after he finished the scenario it disgusted whatever sense of self he still had left, which was not much. That sense of self left after that, too disgusted to go on, and he supposes that it makes sense. In his room with nobody to judge him, he has created a different set of logic to live by, and he is king of the vast amount of _nothingness _he possesses.

The silence grows so loud, buzzes up against his ears and wiggles inside his skull, that he has to talk, to make noise, for he cannot make music. His fingernails are growing long; if he had the blood he would scratch himself, but he doesn't. He is a walking skeleton according to the mirror, his hair turning green and his eyes bulging from sickly skin that sticks. He strips and examines the way the bones of his hips slice against the air, how he can run a finger down his ribs and produce something similar to music. He plays his own body, evicting sounds with his bones clamoring against each other. The noises are piercing and aggravating but he does it anyway. It's not the desire for punishment but curiosity that causes him to form beats out of his bones, to get rhythm from his rib cage, sound from his solar plexus. It's really fucking metal and brutal and he laughs a hollow laugh at this realization. Maybe if he showed it to the others they would, at last, care about something other than themselves.

He is disintegrating. If there was wind, or something similar to a current, he would float away. But there isn't and he doesn't. _But there isn't and he doesn't. Men han är inte, och han gör inte_. An uncomforting mantra in his head. His grasp on the other language loosens until he can't produce a simple sentence. His thoughts are so, so blurry. He is losing himself. He leans in close to the mirror until he has made connection with his reflection, but the connection is shallow. His thoughts have regressed into their primal state, no words, just feelings and urges with no way to communicate them. He howls, long, wolfish things, howls at the window. He wants to punch the glass in-he tries to punch the glass in-and he can't, he is too weak. When he lowers his hand to his hips the bones of his wrist and pelvis grind against each other, causing all the other bones in his body to shiver in fright and disgust. Fright and disgust at himself, at the unrecognizable man in the mirror.

He misses the empty words of his nurse, the softness of her body, the way she let him destroy her from the inside out to make him feel better. He misses this because he misses him, the hardness of his body, the way he helped him mend himself from the inside out. Flesh cannot replace flesh and he has no flesh left to spare. He didn't know that starving oneself could work this fast, but he didn't remember the last time he ate, either. Sometimes he holds his head beneath the faucet of his bathroom sink and drinks the water. It tastes rusty and unclean, but he's not sure if that's the actual qualities the water has, or the ones his mind is giving it.

He has no sanity left to spare. His time travelling plays cease and he folds himself onto his bed in a loose fetal position. He is so tired, his paper lids are drooping over his bulging eyes. He used to hold him like this, he remembers it, can almost _feel _the heavy weight of another human between his arms. He is so exhausted he feels it crawling up his limbs, like poison eating away what remains of his flesh, and maybe this is it, what he's been waiting for, that sweet release. He sleeps for the first time, a fitful, black thing of no dreams, and wakes up to a world anew.

IV. VIRGINITY

The first day that He enters the room, he presses his back against the wall opposite the door. It is on a rare occasion that he is clothed and has not been scratching at himself recently, and for that he is grateful. He has not seen another human face in a long time-he doesn't know how long, so maybe it hasn't been that long at all, actually-and to see one now is jarring. The contrast of Him, tall and tan and cloaked and crooked and smelling like night and walking like the moon, to the blankness of the room, of the boy against the wall, only serves to further push him into the wall. The wall is cold and there is nowhere to go and He is advancing, the door has shut behind him and he was too distracted to look through it, and then He is in front of him, His hands around his throat. He has strong fingers that are pressing bruises into the tender, once dark and now pale skin, little moon phases to match the way He snarls as He brings their mouths together.

The other man's mouth tastes like vinegar decades beyond its expiration date and flowers that you'd bring to a funeral when they begin to wilt. He has no strength but He is strong and he knows it's futile to fight so he does not, only lets the man swivel around in his mouth with His tongue while His fingers choke him until he faints.

But He doesn't kill him and he awakes slumped against the wall. That is the first time the man comes, leaving a choker of His fingerprints around his neck that no amount of scratching and pulling will remove. They do not hurt, he realizes, as he pinches the skin and imagines what he would look like in the mirror or to another person. He imagines what He saw when He walked through the door, both arriving and leaving his room. The bruises, purple as the bags beneath his eyes and the shadows of his exposed bones, do not hurt. That is the first time He comes, but it is not the last time.

His visits are irregular. The second time is soon after the first. The man opens the door to catch him braiding his hair over his side, humming to himself, almost peaceful, almost happy, having had escaped for a second-then he's shoved against the wall of a bathroom and his sweatpants are shoved down and there is a hand over his eyes and a hand between his legs and a mouth biting into his cheek. He's dizzy from the sensory and emotional overload and he's not sure if he shut his eyes or if his brain did for him. It's over as soon as it started and once more he is sitting slumped on the floor, chin lolling against his chest. This time he does not have the pleasure of blacking out. His vision swims from dizziness, pain and shock, he teeters in and out, but there is no release, no savior. His lips are buzzing from abuse and everything hurts, he has to be bleeding _somewhere_. His hair is halfway braided over his shoulder. It takes him a long time to lift his hands to undo the braid, run his fingers through his hair to detangle it, and step into the shower to wash away the stickiness. It takes him an even longer time to wash away the stickiness.

The man gets into the habit of cutting him. It starts with His fingernails, a familiar sensation, raking down his chest. He retraces previous cuts to ensure that they will scar and drags his hands from his shoulder blades to his knee, ten jagged red tracks down his body. He digs into the deposits of flesh that remain soft: his thighs, his cheeks, his navel. He whispers tongues in his ears while He does it and he does nothing because there's nothing he can do, there's no fight at him in this point. His limbs are limp unless He is holding one of them to leave His mark. Sometimes He bites, vampirish almost to the point of cartoonish, and He has an unusual large mouth with teeth that stamp his skin. There is no part of him untouched: his kneecaps are black and bloodied from his weight being forced upon them, his face is wrinkling with creases he didn't know he could make his face fold into, his elbows are sharp enough to make an earsplitting noise if he runs them down the wall and when he does, skin scrapes off. Then He gets into the habit of cutting him with a knife, the same knife that stabbed him-this is the first and only time he wonders how he recovered from the stabbing, why there's no evidence of it, or if it only just occurred to him and he can't see the evidence through the web of scars and scabs on the first three layers of his skin-all over his body. He cuts behind his knees, down his forearms, between his fingers and his toes, a shallow circle around his belly button. He bleeds plenty and his food ration is increased to cover this. The two pieces of bread and milk as opposed to water do nothing to compensate and only succeed in making him feel full and nauseated.

The only cut from the knife that he knows will scar is one that begins at the corner of his right eye and rolls down his face, a bloody teardrop, that disappears halfway between his chin and his ear. After the visit that he receives the cut in he drags himself to the mirror in the bathroom with his elbows, his bottom half too sore to walk-it is new, arrived there while he was sleeping, presumably once he lacked the strength to shatter it-and grabs the corner of the sink that it hangs above to force himself to stand. He realizes that he doesn't recognize himself. He cannot name the figure that doesn't seem to need to blink staring at him. He has no words for it.

V. FAST

Three days. He was in his room for three days before the nurse-oh, the nurse, with her doughy belly and billowing thighs-unlocks the door and ushers him out. She speaks in a hushed, hurried voice at first, before she sees him. But when she sees him, sees his skeleton outline pressed against sheets as white as his skin, her voice slows and softens. She carries him-when did he become light enough for the nurse to carry, or was he alway this light?-to the hospital onboard the submarine and tucks him between thin hospital sheets, also as white as his skin. He's so cold. The sheets are not nearly enough and they bring him a quilt that looks as though it was crafted for him by one of the grandmothers he used to fuck in what feels like another life. With what little strength he has, he scans the quilt with his eyes. Patterned squares in pastel greens, yellows, pinks and blues, grid themselves against a grayish landscape that is darker than his skin. It is exhausting just to look at and he falls asleep again.

When he wakes up the quilt has become too hot and he shoves it to the ground. In this act he sees the machines he is hooked up to. Protecting the machines are lines of medical scarecrows. They are pumping him full of strange liquids that he watches drain into his body, into his veins, and wonders if he is being refilled with blood. With lifeforce. He doesn't want that; he pulls his arms forward and tries to break free of these restraints. This does not work, machines lurching and scarecrows falling beside him, and the nurse frowns at him while she cuffs his wrists and ankles to the bed. The cuffs are have more girth than his wrists and ankles and make him feel so heavy but he is not yet ready to give up. He thrusts his hips forward-he can see the ridges of his bones from underneath his hospital gown, moving up and down-until they are tired. He takes the nurse by the hand and gives her a look; she knows what he's asking and she shakes her head. There's nothing to live for now, he realizes. Chained to a hospital bed with the irony of getting worse while getting better, life being given against his will as he wishes for it to wither away, no drugs, no sex, no booze, no music, nothing but hollow days and wisps of night that he catches between fitful sleep. His heavy eyes close, always so heavy even if he sleeps not at all or through the night or he can't see the ridges of his hips beneath his gown anymore, his eyes are always so heavy, he wishes, sincerely, for Death, capitalized, insurmountable, ultimate.

He pleads the nurse with a different question now, one he forms with words and not with gazes. Each time she is by his side she takes one of her hands in both of his and he asks to Die, capitalized, insurmountable, ultimate. The nurse shakes her head. It is not the legality or the morality of physician-assisted suicide. It is that he _can't_ die. He doesn't understand the _can't _part and she offers no further explanation, so he keeps asking the question, shuffling their hands so that he's holding hers. He hears her heart break every time he asks, but he can't and won't stop, for this is the only way he knows how to escape this suffering. He has no idea what is happening outside the hospital-are the others as broken as him, do they lock themselves in their rooms, do they hurt and ache as he does? The nurse has stopped giving him answers, only lets him hold her hands as she stands beside his bedside. It _feels _like his deathbed but it isn't his deathbed, it's his lifebed, it's bringing him back from the brink. He so desperately wants to undo it all. And he can't.

He begins to feel odd stabbing sensations all over his body-behind his knees, down his forearms, between his fingers and toes, a shallow circle around his belly button-that make his body twitch and jerk. The nurse tells him that they don't know the source of the pain but it will not kill him. (It cannot kill him.) When he hears this, he stops enjoying the pain and begins despising it. He despises everything human, turns his nose at food until they're forced to inject it, the medical scarecrows cradling bags of amber live-giving liquid, and even turns away his precious nurse. He is ready for something that just can't fucking come.

But after what feels like forever they undo the cuffs and shackles and needles and release him. He stumbles-he hasn't walked in so long-then regains a prideful stride. A quick look in the mirror and he recognizes himself, still gaunt but _there_, taking up space and a shape. He's not a skeleton but a living being with meat between bones and skin. It's the most disgusting thing he's ever seen, an amazing feat considering the amount of disgust he's been feeling lately. He punches the mirror in, shards sticking in his skin, but he doesn't even look at them. The stinging pain in his hand taunts him, whispers that it's better than him, that it has control over him. He doesn't want it to have control. He wants his control back. He wants the ability to _can_. He strolls out of the hospital ward and takes the stairs, strength flowing to him from the source of finality, Death, capitalized, insurmountable, ultimate, urging at his heels, directing him to where he needs to be. This is it. He is no longer constricted by advances in technology, under the care of the best doctors in the entire world, locked in a bed in a hospital room. He is himself again, maybe a little less than usual, but he will regain what he has lost. He is so close now, he can see it, can feel it breathing against his neck, Death, capitalized, insurmountable, ultimate-

His hand is on the handle when somebody stops him.

VI. SAVIORS

The clown is his salvation. The clown kills every single guard in the compound by himself, bursts through the door with a flourish that he can't give proper tribute to because he's laying on top of a sheetless bed and might as well be dead, and carries him away with his bloody hands. Blood is everywhere, both foreign and his own; the only noticeable scrape extends from the corner of his eye and down his cheek in a curve. All the others are gone and he can't explain it. The scrape on his face is old but leaks blood occasionally, and it begins to cry as the clown carries him. The clown expresses exhaustion and allows him to walk for himself. The horizon tilts, the ceiling and floor blend together, the walls close in on him. His body racks and trembles and falls against the walls as they come nearer. His feet make loud noises on the concrete of the compound. He squeezes his eyes shut and moves at a slower pace. The clown gets sick of it and carries him in both of his arms. He falls asleep; he is weak. He is so, so weak.

He has failed. He accepted this a long time now and the truth sinks in him, a brick in a lake. It is almost a release when the brick hits the bottom-no sound, for it is underwater, and gently, for it is underwater-and he can relax, maybe. He may be confusing complete and utter numbness and exhaustion with relaxation. He doesn't remember becoming this heavy but his body is so heavy. He dreams for the first time in a long time, rocking in the clown's arms as they make their great escape. He dreams that none of this happened. He dreams that he marries his old lover in a traditional ceremony; it is beautiful and their mothers cry for them. He hasn't thought about him, the old lover, in a long time, he realizes. He hasn't _thought_ in a long time. The dream ends as he and his lover exit the reception hall to embark on a life anew; the guests throw chrysanthemum petals of all colors that litter the ground around them and stick in their hair, everything warps into a nightmare when they reach the end of the aisle, and he falls into the mouth of a beast with a large mouth.

He wakes up to a bowl of broth being tipped between his chapped lips and into his mouth,, his head in the lap of somebody he does not recognize. He drinks the whole bowl of broth, feels greedy and gluttonous, then cries for hours because of this. He realizes that his head is in the lap of a woman with a doughy belly and billowing thighs, a hood pulled over her face. He feels comfort at once, unsure why, and drifts back to sleep seconds after the realization. He had done his hair in a multitude of braids, the most he's ever done, tiny and straining on his scalp, without even realizing it, moments before the clown burst through the door. He wakes later to the woman undoing the braids with care, taking a break to run her hands along the sharp bones of his face. The pad of her thumb lingers on the place where his cheek sinks between cheekbone and jaw bone. She holds another bowl of broth to his mouth for him to drink and he does, this time without crying.

He wavers in an out. Each time he is awake something new floats back to him. The first is a grasp of the languages he has long forgotten, nothing more than a basic understanding, but it's there, his tongue rolling words that he remembers around. The woman is encouraging as she combs the waves and tangles out of his hair. _I, you, me, them. _She nod as he says them. Next he realizes that he is in a helicopter, spacious and high in the sky, darkly lit. It's a familiar helicopter, one he remembers from what feels like another life. Again, the woman is encouraging as she threads flowers-chrysanthemums, he recognizes upon the next bout of lucidity-through his hair. He wakes up fully near the end of his journey and is able to sit up in the seat beside the woman. She holds his hands as he tests words out-_star, butterfly, whiskey_-and she gives him small nods when he gets words right. _Cemetery, thunder, scarf_. He tries it in another language-_hus, gutt, himmel_-but the woman is unable to confirm or deny, cannot speak the language he was raised on, and it's disheartening. He returns to to the other language. _Wheel, book, screen_. Maybe if he could see the woman's face she would be smiling.

He consumes four bowls of broth and a piece of bread, good bread, fresh and warm and unlike what they fed him in the compound, throughout the ride. New tastes shock his tongue and make his stomach feel a little uneasy. It is an oddity he appreciates, no matter how simple and small. He still feels weak but something in him is nudging optimism forward, his eyes are brightening. Everything will be okay.

The wound on his face splits open at once and burns with a pain before unfelt as they touch down. His pain escalates as the blades of the helicopter wind down and become clearly refined. The nurse hurries with ointment and remedies but it doesn't work-he clutches and claws at his face, dragging blood down his lips and under his chin and on his neck, he screams a childish sounding scream. The nurse pets his hair and tries to sooth him and it doesn't work, his eyes are shut so, so tight, he is blind as they lead him off the helicopter. He stumbles and feels blades of grass under the balls of his bare feet and between his toes. He ca hear a screeching death metal song playing from somewhere above-from the fucking _sky_. The pain goes as abrupt as it came and he lifts his head to see where they have taken in, hope loud in his ears.

The clown deposits him in his old residence; he does not see the clown again.

VII. GODS

The clown has completed his mission ahead of schedule. They tell him this as his hand is on the handle. He feels a spike of hope for the first time in weeks and then he is on the ground again, sorrowful. He doesn't want to know what had happened, what shreds of a person are left, but he doesn't have a choice. Everything is so out of his control, he's grabbing for anything and everything eludes him, spinning out of reach so fast it makes him dizzy. He follows the person who rescued him, their hand in his, off the submarine and into one of those escape pods. When he is out of the pod he is shuffled into a helicopter. This is when he hears the awful music raining down from the heavens. This is also when he sees the others for the first time. He doesn't know what to make of them-they look the same, a little more tired maybe, but they're joking and laughing and talking amongst themselves. They don't notice him, or if they do they ignore him, slumped in a seat and exsanguinated. He is so tired, he sleeps the rest of the way to wherever they're going (having already forgotten), all strength gone.

They arrive before the clown. Their old rooms feel unfamiliar to him; he finds no comfort anywhere. Even the nurse is absent. The others busy themselves with their jobs and he is told he has none. He is told that he must wait, that he will be here soon, that it is a long journey from where is coming. These scraps of information are of no use to him. He wants to lash out, ask why he wasn't told any of this shit earlier, demand the answer as to why they thought it was unimportant to tell him-_his_ lover, _his_ closest friend, _his_ _everything_-what the fuck was going on with _him_. He lacks the strength to do these things and instead he retreats into himself, his shrunken soul operating his body from somewhere deep inside. He ghosts the halls, up and down and all around, getting lost. He scratches at his arms with overgrown fingernails until he bleeds. The sight of his blood shocks him; he was certain he had been exsanguinated a long time ago, his blood replaced with a synthetic medical supplement.

They are in the dining hall when _he_ returns. Somebody with a hood over their face had came to summon him from where he had been, on a balcony overlooking a vast expanse of nothingness behind the structure, for _he_ would be returning soon and he could not miss it. He knows he should've had _some _reaction to that, but every ounce of emotion had been drained so long ago. He continues his ghosting, this time with a destination, and deposits his body in a chair in the dining hall. He slumps, his arms dangling in a way that's uncomfortable and sort of hurts, and waits. The others do not look at him, their eyes focused on the door, while he looks at the table top. He manages to lift his head in the general direction of the entrance when he hears the sound of wood parting from stone, a sliver of light creeping across the floor. They can't even look at each other; they look everywhere but. He focuses on the clown, on the _blood_.

The blood is everywhere on the clown and, judging by his peripheral vision, _him_. There's a splatter across the clown's face, dried and flaking like that on his hands, but against the clown's chest the blood is more red, recent. He lurches forward like he's about to puke and even opens his mouth but nothing comes up. The others ignore him as they flock to _him. _Their manager pulls _him _close, wraps his arms around _him_, while the others place sundry hands on various parts of _his_ body and have manly exchanges about how much they've missed _him_. _He _doesn't speak. He dares to look at _his_ face and sees _his _eyes wide, looking out one of the extensive windows. That's when he sees a bloody tear stain that he realizes to be a cut, from the corner of _his _eye to under _his _chin. There's a cold cup of coffee in front of him and he grabs it, drinking the entire thing, just to have something to do with his hands.

The clown disappears into the chaos. He will never see him again, nor will he bear him much thought in the future. His fingers clench around the empty coffee mug, only black dregs and scrapes of the putrid liquid remaining. He swirls them around each other, watching as they collide and separate. There are so, so many things he wants to say, but he has never been good with words in any language. His tongue is heavy and his throat too tight, burning with acidity, to bother forming words, anyway. He wonders if this is painful for _him_, and if the level of pain _he _feels (if any at all) can match that of his own. Maybe it's just the coffee, but there's demons in the pit of his stomach clawing their way up his digestive track, and this time when he opens his mouth, a thick black liquid spills out. _That's _definitely the coffee, but he imagines it as the demons, the beautiful purge he's been waiting for. The liquid spreads sluggishly across the tabletop and he watches it, mouth slack, unable to do anything.

The nurse is back and she ushers him away with a plump hand on his slender shoulder. He notes the darker complexion of her skin, the way it contrasts with the utter whiteness of his. He can see his veins, the map of his body, beneath his skin. The nausea has not subsided and halfway to his room he stops, doubling over and dry-heaving for a pregnant amount of time. The nurse is their to lift his hair for him, rub his back, and lead him away when he thinks he is finished. She waits in the doorway of his room as he curls under his blankets. He rubs at his limbs and wonders if he'll ever stop feeling so cold and small, so useless and insignificant.

He wants to sacrifice himself. It is the most noble, proud thing-and perhaps the only thing of use-he can do, but he can't bring himself to voice this, so he continues to scratch himself, silently offering his blood as a sacrifice to those deities above even him. _Take me instead of him_. _Why didn't you take me instead of him? _He has always been the more worthy one. The better one. _Me in place of him_ becomes his shortened prayer. He was never a religious man. But he is religion in a man. A god. They all are; he's not special. _Me in place of him. _He is selfish; he never even thinks of the others. Let them burn on this hellacious world.

He wants to give the world back to _him_, the reborn world, the one where the heavens don't play a death song beckoning them to his fates, loud, obnoxious and omnipresent. The world where people don't combust as they go throughout their activities, the clouds above summoning their blood only to let it rain down somewhere else. The world where trees are not dying at an accelerating rates, bark black and bare. The world where lightning doesn't strike fire everywhere it lands, sending blazes barreling down streets and through alleys, metropolises taken in minutes. The world that is not the one they are currently living in. The peaceful world. The world _he_, God of Death, is worthy of. He, God of Life, should be able to do that, and yet, is not.

VIII. PAIN

He doesn't speak. The servants usher him away and care for him. He insists that he takes the chrysanthemums out from his hair and unbraid it himself. He requests this, and does it, without words. He is also without the nurse from the helicopter, but he's relatively certain that she is the one that leads _him _away. At first he cannot look at _him_, it's painful, but the sound of liquid splattering against the table beckons his eyes. Pain turns into sadness that envelops him. His poor lover is sick with something, something black and slimy, and his eyes remain on _his _figure as _he _exits the room through a door that is not the one he came through. He himself is too sick to see _him _right now, he is not worthy at the moment, as battered and as bruised as he is. The others ask him if he was well cared for, and he supposes that apart from the bloody gash on his face, he looks the part. His skin, once so tan and now so pale, is unmarked, and the true depth of his skinniness is hidden by the baggy clothes he wears. His facial hair looks as well-kept as it did when he was taken. He is barefoot but his feet do not hurt from walking through tough terrain.

The scrape on his cheek leaves a scar, a single tear stain. So much blood, so many tears have been shed for them, the fated. It is only fitting. He continues to scratch at his arms until there are tracks running the lengths of them. He wants to be imperfect. He wants to wear the badges of the clown's victory on his skin. He wants to display the severity of which he was tortured. He'll bleed but his wounds will heal themselves, sometimes instantly and sometimes overnight, reminding him that he can never be imperfect for there is no room for imperfect function in an immortal being. He continues to take showers at high temperatures until his attendants notice the burns on his skin (what does it matter, they will heal anyway) and he is only allowed to take baths drawn by somebody else. Sometimes these baths have mounds of fluffy bubbles that he spends a long time smashing against the floor and wall until they disappear.

His nurse returns to him, goes back and forth between the two separated lovers in their individual chambers, cares for him. She says nothing as he attempts to break his own skin. He always fails, _always_, and comes to the conclusion that the knife that left the scar was different, somehow. It had the ability to hurt him, really hurt him, and he finds himself longing for it. Not for Him, but for His weapon. He tells these thoughts to the nurse for they are vile even to him and he he feels so _wrong_, so _fucked up_, so _broken_. He expresses exasperation at how he can _feel _this way, but can't _look _this way, and his nurse wraps her expansive arms around in a comforting and sympathetic gesture. She speaks, a woman of little words, then, and tells him that it is understandable he feels this way and that he is not alone.

He cannot prevent his thoughts from flickering back to his time of captivity. Laying on his back in the dark with hands crossed over his belly, it is all he can think about. Every night, even if only for a few seconds, he forgets where he is and begins to anticipate Him entering through his door and repeating His acts upon his body. He seizes up with fear when he imagines this. He understands that He was not an immortal, not a god, not like them. If there is an opposite of a god-and he doesn't believe that to be humanity-He was that. He was what can hurt a god, and He was what hurt a god, and now this hurt god has no room in his life for anything beside pain and contemplation. Even as he voices this train of thought out loud to the nurse, he wonders if he used the wrong tense. He isn't sure if He is a _was _or an _is_.

He orders the nurse to remove every piece of evidence of a life before pain from his dwellings and watches absently as she summons more of her kind to do his bidding. They are his servants, his attendants, beneath him, so many are beneath him. They remove toys that he remembers loving, drawings that he remembers pasting, posters that he remembers stapling to the walls of his room. They remove the large stickers on his ceiling that make up their universe, planets and stars and the sun to scale, the one that he enlisted _his _help in putting up. His heart constricts when he sees the nurse with the final piece of his old life in her arm, a stuffed animal with a forked tail, and uses a hand to do something beside scratch at himself. He places it on the woman's shoulder, his eyes pleading, and she gives him the stuffed animal.

He holds it in his arms and he feels young again.

It's not the youth that he felt in his chamber at His palace. It's not a youth he has ever felt, truthfully. It's a youth he has yearned to feel for so long, a youth with freedom and beauty and all these things he didn't experience even in minute and diluted quantities until he was young no more. The youth he imitated with the fragments of his life they are extricating from his room. He holds the stuffed animal close and the urges to harm himself lessen the tighter he hugs the thing. The strongest feelings of youth he has ever felt surge forward like a tsunami arcing over the shore. His eyes are squeezed shut in such a way they hurt, but he can feel the nurse smiling, can feel her presence leave the room. He no longer needs her, she is needed much more by someone else. This someone else needs him much, he realizes, and he takes great care in placing the stuffed animal on the bed (no sheets, like the one he had been tortured upon) before running down the hallway. His hair, unbraided, fans behind him. His barefoot gait makes loud sounds that echo down stone hallways. He feels wind against his face without a distinguishable source and feels that youth again, that freedom and beauty. He wants to take off and fly, but flight is a power of life, not one of death.

He has the presence of mind to slow down as he approaches _his _room. The nurse is by the door, like she'd been waiting for him, and she opens it for him. She nods at him as he slips inside.

IX. TRUTH

Their reunion is permanent.

They reattach themselves; his blood flows backwards, into his veins, refilling the emptiness. He did not receive his blood, his life, back in the submarine's hospital. He receives it tangled in the sheets of his bed, holding the body of another. Their bodies mend themselves as they connect them to each other. Their skin darkens to their usual tones. Their hair regains the usual qualities. Everything goes back to normal. He watches as the scar on his lover's face retreats into his eye. They exchange words. They exchange touches. They exchange themselves. They sew their hips together with a thin thread. Their smiles hurt their faces.

He feels like everything should be draped in a golden light but the light outside is ugly and red, the sky reflecting the blood that fills the oceans as opposed to water. As a god he is aware of the cruel sense of humor of the cosmos and like with blood oceans, past mistakes hang above his head, haunting him. But it is okay-he has his other half back in his arms, he can envision the warm golden light for himself, he buries his face in the crook where neck meets shoulder and if he hooks his teeth on the other man's skin it does not leave bite marks. He, too, has no scars from his activities, and maybe the most comforting part is that somebody else lacks them also. Every part of him is comforting, from behind his knees to down his forearms to between his fingers and toes to a shallow circle around his belly button.

The apocalypse is coming in a month. They are unaware. They spend a week together for every second, restored. Nobody notices and nobody cares; they do not leave his room, they do not dress themselves. They talk and fuck and feel their strength building inside of them. He is still uncertain about his hand in the end but no longer about his godliness. He is maybe look forward to after the end, when he'll take his stone throne with the others and rule the universe (if the prophecy is correct-scholars have been debating this), an eternity with a hand in his. They are the lover gods, the pair of Life and Death, he shoves his mouth against the other man's and swirls his tongues around the words _Liv och Død_.

The spend a week together until the lie rolls off his lover's tongue, tears running their premade tracks:

"I'm okay. They treated me okay. Everything is going to be okay."

He says it while they are in his own bed, basking in the light of their shared nurse has left earlier that day, saying that her time is up and she must go the way of her lord. They know that they will not see her again and the goodbye had no touch of bitter in its sweet. He had asked, his voice a whisper around the other man's ear, what it had been like to be captured, how it had felt. He had been nauseatingly curious since the day in the dining room. He thought that the timing was, at last, appropriate. He thought they could overcome this.

He thought wrong. The tremble of the other man's body indicates this as the falsehood flutters from his lips. The betrayal is heavy in his chest. His face falls, completely void of expression. He leaves the bed and walks to the extensive windows he had installed in his room naked, puts a hand on the glass. He can see his reflection in only slight glimpses, the rest being a view of the red world with its blackened features. The flash of an eye, the curve of a nose, he leans his forehead against the glass and closes his eyes. For the first time in the week, he dismisses the other man.

He will admit that the emptiness he feels inside stems from a source of selfishness and pride. He will admit that the emptiness he feels is nothing compared to the physical pangs of being separated from one's other half. He will admit that the emptiness he feels is purely emotional, residing in his head and knocking against the back of his forehead. He will admit that he does not need the nurse, or even his lover, to heal him back from this, but himself. He is doubting himself. He is disappointed in his ability to provide a place of comfort. He is disappointed in himself for feeling empty, for feeling so utterly and despondently devoted, for feeling urges of monogamy. As a man he despised the notion and now as a god he embraces it. He is aware of the irony of the cosmos and at the same time aware of the immense strength-he does not allow himself to think of the origins of this strength-of his own godliness. He has a hand in the irony, a hand in the end, a hand in the universe, and he will be respected.

He does not tie a band around his arm and inject a substance that will make him forget. He does not wander the hallways without purpose, spooking the countless residents. He does not shun food and socialization and lock himself in a room to play pretend. He carries on as normal, meeting with the others to discuss their activities and how they can nudge the world along in its dying days. He talks, he laughs, he behaves as normally as he possibly can while ignoring the other part of his soul, who does not show up. They are four without five, five without six, but they do not speak about their missing piece. If they had it would be unfair; they all know that it's not so much _theirs _as _his_. After all, one cannot have death without life.

X. LIES

It's dark outside, a cold summer night, and goosebumps are rising on his skin. They're by a lake in a faraway land, fighting the apocalypse the best they can, which isn't very good. The apocalypse is coming and their roles are so fuzzy-they are gods, the five of them, he knows this. God of Music, God of Pleasure, God of War, God of Life, and him, God of Death. Somewhere along the way they shed their human forms, if they had any to begin with, and donned their divine cloaks. They look the same as they always have, of course, but their eyes glow red when they watch the destruction outside. This is what the God of Life had told him, pillow talk with lazy words and drooping eyes. It hasn't been that long, a handful of days with hours leaking between the fingers, since he's heard these things, but he misses the voice that delivered the rather unsurprising information.

This is the first time he's been outside since he spoke the lie. Despite all of the travelling their residence has done-it's impressive, really, watching their godly house slice through the sky with improved flight powers-he has not left his room, he couldn't bear it. He regretted the words the second they were born, but he couldn't take them back, it's not in his power to reverse time. He doesn't know whose power reversing time would be. It wouldn't be one of their particular council. He knows there are other councils, both above, below and on his level, and he knows that they're dealing with their own apocalypses of their own kinds. He doesn't think it would be within any god, in any council, to change the concept of time. As he understands it time will continue to move, things will continue to happen, and no force will stop this. He wanted to wait an adequate time for his other half to cool off-he knows his pride, his selfishness, well-but failed, he missed him too much. He misses him too much.

The recipient of his lie is facing away from him, towards the lake, watching the ripples in the dark water. The oceans have been replaced with blood but not the smaller sources and he understands this to be of their doing, somehow. The details are so vague it would drive another man insane. He is more concerned with the figure before him. Moonlight threads through his hair, illuminates it to an ethereal color, picks up the paleness on his skin. He looks as heavenly as the God of Life should look.

His heart aches, teeters in his chest. He reaches out a hand before returning it to rubbing his arms, he's so fucking cold, he just wants to be held. It's been less than a hundred hours since he's last had the arms of the one he loves wrapped around him but it feels like it's been a hundred centuries. The melodrama never occurs to him-it is fitting that at the end of the world, everything feels like the end of the fucking world. He shouts an apology. The figure in front of him tenses but doesn't respond to his gesture.

He falls to his knees. He begs, he pleads. He just wants to be held, he just wants reciprocation, he just wants love. He was protecting him from the terrible truth-is that what he wants, the truth? The truth burns coming up as he lets it dribble from his lips, working backwards. Terrible pain. The clown's rescue, how he was too weak to even walk. The inability to recognize himself in the mirror. The knife that had the ability to harm an immortal longer than anything he's encountered before. The way He shoved him against walls, on the floor, on the bed with no sheets, into corners, into twisting positions that snapped his bones, and took what wasn't His. The way His fingers felt grabbing him by the hair and pulling his head back to expose his neck, the way his spine cracked and rolled. The callused fingers leaving flower petal bruises around his neck and the way He kept replacing them. The measly rations. The way it reminded him of his childhood. He tells it all, tells it _twice_, tries to get _something_.

He receives no response.

Then, the figure turns, and unveils a truth of his own, working from the beginning this time. He hears of an inability to live, of the band around the arm and the needle finding a vein for the first time in so long, collisions with floors, apathy. He hears of willing isolation, the feeling of exsanguination, of watching your own life leave before your eyes and not caring a bit. He hears of forgetting how to speak in any language, sleep with the hope of never waking up, sordid affairs with the nurse. He hears of hospitalization, suicidal intentions, the hand on the handle before a hand on him told him that it was all going to end and not in the way that he had intended. He hears of demons in the pit of stomachs and inner battles and bile. He hears of his own inability to recognize himself in the mirror.

It's horrible and he shrinks out of instinct. He realizes that he had operated under the assumption that he had been the only one to suffer, as selfish and as prideful than his partner, perhaps even more.

It's a battle of wills, a battle of strengths, a battle of weaknesses. He told a lie; he has to pay for the consequences. They're in love; they have to understand this. They have to overcome. Eventually he is embraced and he is warmed and he stops shivering and they walk away from the lake, back towards their room, fall into the rest of the night. They cannot fight the apocalypse. They cannot fight their feelings. They're not the best of human beings because they are not human beings. But they love each other; they lose the lie somewhere in the lake and it drowns, never to surface again, and he feels okay, maybe. Not really. He doesn't know how one could feel alright, starring in the face of the apocalypse.

XI. SOULS

He forgives him because he loves him and only him. His welcoming into their council-then referred to as a band-had sealed this. It was not love at first sight, but a recognition that he was important, or would become important, at least. He had been the one to get the band-the council-to accept him. He couldn't play the guitar worth shit, spoke the most clipped English he'd ever heard, had the most trusting eyes he'd ever seen. He lifted his nose to him, ignorant that he and the rest had begun to shed their mortal forms, begun to become gods. They were beginning to fulfill their prophecies, their fame rolling onwards, money flying at them. It took them well into their days of divinity to come to the realization that they needed each other-they hadn't used terms like _love _or _other half _or _soul mate _or any other inadequate words for what they mean to each other until this apocalypse ordeal-but once they had, they were unstoppable. Until they were stopped. And started. And stopped again.

He has to forgive him, it's the only thing he can do, he loves this man (not really, but that is what they appear as) before him. They, quite literally, cannot exist, at least not properly, without the other one within a reasonable amount of distance. Looking at him from his position by the lake, watching him shrink as he throws remarks of hate and competition at this, he realizes it. Behind the words of ill will hides a need and a fondness so great they forced him to behave like this to his other half. So he walks forward and he envelops him because he loves him (and he loves him back) and there's nothing they can do to change that, nor would they ever want to. Without conscious thought and with hands linked-why he would ever stop touching him, he is uncertain-they return to his dwellings (always the preferred, with his larger bed and newer floor-length windows) and land on the mattress. He strips him of his clothes and leans back, instructing him to sit like a statue of a king, to let him look at him in full. The broad chest, the defined muscle, the long hair. The bronze of his skin and brawn of his body. He reaches up and puts his hands flat against his chest, smiles, tells him he is beautiful. He looks young. They all do, their bodies frozen in a more youthful state that will be theirs as gods forever. But he looks the youngest, the purest, the best, and maybe it's just the cosmos playing cruel irony with him as God of Death again, but this is irony he can enjoy. He bends his back and brings their lips together, keeps bending until he has that beautiful body trapped beneath his own.

They are the most exquisite of couples, the most aesthetic of pairs, the most glorious of gods, he thinks as he works his way into the other man's mouth with his tongue. He doesn't care about the other pairs of lover gods-he knows there are more, naturally, what with gods of love and hate and happiness and rage-because he knows that no pair will outdo them. They are the highest ranked in their field, perhaps even the highest ranked of gods (a thought that hadn't occurred to him before), Life and Death, and currently they are working to begin a world. He has breached his mouth and he is beginning to breach other places, their bodies pressed together as tight as they will allow.

His soul is singing to him. He hears it against his ears, the horrid screeching of the heaven's death metal song finally silenced. The music he hears is unlike any he experienced as a mortal. It is the music of the gods and he does not have the words in any earthly language to describe it. He wants it to stay, though, and finds that the tighter their bodies press, the more the meld, the louder and sweeter it becomes. If they separate even a fraction of a fraction of distance, the sound lessens just a fraction of a fraction of a decibel, and it is unbearable. He knows his other half hears it too by the look in his eyes and fierceness of his movements, and he has never felt as complete as he does when they reach a sexual climax.

So unwilling to move they stay like that, him laying on top of his other half and keeping the full brunt of his weight from him with two hands pressing into the mattress beside them. The music has quieted considerably so that they may hear each other speak (though they do not speak, for they do not have words in this earthly language to describe any of what is going on) but is still there, stuffed in his ears. His arms grow sore and he must roll beside his other half, taking him into his arms. He presses loose flower petal kisses around his neck and wants the mark of his lips to stay so that he may wear them not as a choker of bruises but as a necklace of kisses. This does not happen but it does not bother him. The thought is nice enough.

He notices his other half begin to braid his own hair over his shoulder with deft fingers, blushing when he sees his eyes on his fingers. His other half opens his mouth to speak and excuse the action but he does not allow it, placing a hand over his parted lips. He indicates for him to continue braiding his hair. He watches it, transfixed by the delicacy and the skill, the way he cares for each individual strand. When he is finished he summons a servant and asks for flowers, specifically lotus flowers and acorns. The servant returns with his requested flowers and he inserts them with great care into his braid. His other half's smile is contagious, spreading to his own face. He takes a lotus flower and acorn from his hands and inserts them into his other half's braid himself.

XII. SALVATION

He perches on the edge of his bed and watches him sleep, hair sprawled behind his head on his pillow, his eyes closed. He has snowflake eyelids and invisible eyelashes, long and swooping to the side. He knows this from experience, from feeling them against his face, from seeing them when he pulls back just enough and they make open eye contact. He knows from experience that hidden behind his eyelids are blue eyes, not electric because of their color but because of the effect they have on him. His own eyes are a plain, similar color, a tribute to their shared origins of birth and similar gene pool, and he likes to think that they have electric elements to them as well. But he is nowhere as stunning a person as the man on the bed before him.

He can appreciate the symmetry of his face, the beautiful craft that the gods have created with the cheekbones and the eyelashes and the lips. They're gods themselves, but not the type of gods that create faces as splendid as this. He would never want to be because he knows he couldn't exceed the phenomenon of the figure before him, like so many times before. He smiles and appreciates the quiet. With no physical connection he can't hear the sweet song of their love but from experience he knows he's immune for just a few more minutes to the raging death metal song of the heavens with its screeching guitar notes, overly loud bass, thrashing drums, no vocals and sounds he's never heard before, all equally awful inside of his head. He does not look forward to the return of the song but takes comfort in that as long as they are together he does not have to hear it.

He's dressed on the edge of his bed, having just pulled up his boots over his pants, but he doesn't want to move, not yet. It's creepy to watch somebody sleep; he doesn't care. They are alone in his-now their, he must remind himself-room with nobody to judge them and so he watches him sleep. He watches his chest pulsate with every breath, the way his lips are parted just ever so slightly, how he has rolled onto his back without another body to hold, one arm draped across his chest and another outstretched in space he had previously occupied. It is not rare that he wakes before him; he sleeps little these days, plagued by nightmares that won't go away. Not everything is as perfect as the visage of the man laid before him, after all. He reaches out and strokes his cheek with his thumb, brushes away a loose strand of hair, mouths the words. _I love you. _He's been practicing.

The earthly languages can't encapsulate them as beings and their emotions and occurrences but he loves the earthly languages anyway. Not nearly as much as he loves the man on the bed, but this is an instance of the earthly languages failing him, for _love _is far too weak of a word. The faults of the words they are able to form do not bother them for they have reached this odd sort of peace, the calm before a storm or more appropriately an apocalypse, and it feels as though they are inside of each other's minds. It feels as though the night they reunited, after the mess with the lies and the lake, they had become one. It's a shame they must live as separates, God of Life and God of Death, even if it is logical. Logic falls in front of love.

Though he would like to he cannot sit around and wax poetic about his role in the universe all day, interrupted only by bouts of physical intimacy and the opportunity to braid flowers into his hair. He knows that soon he will hear the song and we have to return to his work. He stretches his arms above his head and walks over to the window. The entire wall is made of windows, fragile glass, and the sky outside is red. There is chaos in the streets and a song constantly playing from the heavens that he can once more hear, he realizes with a sigh, but he is at peace. Here in the early morning he can pretend that the apocalypse does not share their bed every night and perch on their shoulders when they wake. Here he can pretend he is living his normal life, will exit the room into his daytime job. He will marry his lover in a beautiful ceremony like the one in their dreams (but without the beast) and will live plentiful years, eventually succumbing to something that is in reality under his control. The earth is not destined to end at any moment.

Here he can have peace.

It is true peace, not the peace they have constructed from whatever time is left before the apocalypse. It is the peace that he knows waits for them afterwards. The peace that comes with stone thrones and crowns of thorns to be placed around their head. The peace that comes with the new world that they will rule. The peace that they will attest to. The peace that they will thoroughly enjoy. The peace that they pretend to delay with their duties to appease the citizens of their corrupted world. The peace the Revengencers (defeated by the clown and of concern to him and his lover) and Salacia (defeated by the dead man and of concern to the others) tried to prevent and will pay for, for eternity, in the depths of his domain. The peace that lingers just a jump ahead. The peace that will follow the apocalypse. The peace that will last its proper eternity, and not these scraps of seconds. The peace that they will thoroughly enjoy.

The peace dissipates when the man in the bed stirs and moans, calls his earthly name out of habit. They share a deep kiss, the pleasant song returning, and then he departs as his other half dresses. He is grateful for the silence as he slips into the hall. He prefers to start the day this way, with the lovely unearthly music and not its opposite.

They have different duties today. He prays the world doesn't end while they're separated.

XIII. LIFE AFTER DEATH

The world ends in three weeks while they're sleeping on top of each other.

They don't hear the crescendo of the heavens' death metal song. They don't witness the earth splitting in two, a jagged line leading straight to the the fire of the God of Death's domain. They don't feel the final explosions of the bodies of those that don't fall inside the apocalypse. The spike in temperature doesn't affect them. They are in bliss as they themselves fall, not to the fire but to the court of divine, where they will spend some time crafting the next world and then the rest of forever ruling over it. They sleep through it. Later, the other gods will tell them that they are lucky for this, that what they saw occur in the old world was horrendous and unnecessary, overly dramatic. They won't care. They will sit on top of their unimaginably large stone thrones holding hands.

Their Council's-there will a stupidly long conference on whether or not to capitalize the first letter-crowns

are made of thorn and sharp metal, befitting their earthly occupation, but each member will add something special. The God of Music, Leader of their Council, adds etchings of the lyrics that only he could hear of the song that the old heavens played in the final days of Earth to the band. The God of Pleasure, Secondary Leader of their Council, douses his in their divine alcohol and spears various divine drugs on the spikes of his thorns. The God of War, No Secondary Title Needed, orders his crown to be made with extra long thorns sticking out so that he may use it as a weapon in case the Revengencers or Salacia (locked in the deepest pit of the God of Death's domain) decide to rebel (which they never will, but his crown will look impressive and will be used for a handful of other things, namely executions). They are the only members of any Council, including other pairs of lover gods (it is uncapitalized for it is slang from the new world), to have matching crowns.

Braided in the crowns perched upon their heads are crowns of lotus flowers and acorns.


End file.
